A Life Devoted to Children, Community, and the Quiet Work of Love
Alta Agnes Profitt was born on December 1, 1936, to Jessie Helen Chance Jones and Floyd Milton Jones in Brookvillle, IN. She departed this life peacefully on December 26, 2025. From the start, she carried a rare and luminous calling: to help things grow. Children, confidence, community, hope. Wherever Alta went, life seemed to stand up a little straighter.
Education was not simply her profession—it was her life’s work and her moral center. Alta believed, with her whole heart, that children deserved to be seen, nurtured, challenged, and protected. She believed learning could change the trajectory of a life. And she spent seven decades of her own life proving it.
She graduated from the University of Cincinnati Teachers College in 1955, already carrying both her teaching degree and her first child, Christopher, into the future. Four years later, her daughter Jennifer arrived. Though she had only two children of her own, Alta would go on to teach, guide, and love thousands more, many of whom still remember her name, her smile, and the way she made them feel capable.
Alta began her teaching career with Cincinnati Public Schools, teaching at Carl Street and Roll Hill Elementary from 1965 to 1972. These were the years when civil rights were reshaping the nation, and Alta was already living its values—advocating fiercely for her students and stepping into leadership in inner-city schools because she believed equity was not optional. It was the work.
After returning to Brookville, she taught at St. Michael’s School from 1972 to 1976. In 1976, she founded and directed Tot Spot Nursery School, Brookville’s first licensed preschool. For twenty-five years, Tot Spot was a place where small children were treated with dignity, patience, and joy—and where families felt supported, welcomed, and known.
Alta’s work with young children continued on at Laurel Elementary in the Franklin County Community School Corporation, where she served as an Early Childhood Educator from 2001 to 2012. She then became Parent Coordinator a role she held from 2012 until nearly the age of eighty.
Beyond the classroom, Alta was a builder of community. She was a member of the Lew Wallace Book Club, Homemakers Club, Women’s Circle, Daughters of the American Revolution, Whitewater Canal Trail, Daughter’s of Isabella and Tri Kappa. She was a Cub Scout and Girl Scout leader. She served on the boards of Friends of the Library, the Girl Scouts’ Treaty Line Council, the Imagination Library, and SIEOC. She was a CASA worker, a mentor, and a steady presence in the civic life of Brookville and Franklin County.
Alta had a smile that people remembered for decades—radiant, generous, unmistakable. She also had an uncanny superpower: she could find a four-leaf clover from any vantage point. Standing still. Walking. Even riding a tractor across a field. As though she were tuned to the frequency of hope, of good luck, of the hidden beauty most of us trample right past.
She was preceded in death by her parents; her brother, Floyd “Skeeter” Jones; and her much beloved son, Christopher Profitt. She is survived by her husband of 67 years, Herbert Ralph Profitt—her “Dear Heart”—and her daughter, Jennifer Profitt, along with generations of students, families, and friends who carry her influence forward.
Alta loved Brookville. She loved Franklin County. She loved the generations of children who passed through her classrooms and into the world, better equipped because she had been there. Her legacy lives not only in lesson plans and programs, but in kindness multiplied, in confidence quietly planted, in lives that grew because someone believed early and often.
In the end, Alta Agnes Profitt did what she had done since 1936: she made the world around her kinder, fuller, braver, and more beautiful. Her legacy is in the communities she held together, the families she touched, and the countless hearts she opened simply by showing up—faithfully, generously, and with that unforgettable smile.
May her memory be a blessing, and may all who loved her carry forward the light she left in our hands. A Celebration of life will be held at the Brookville Town Park in late May 2026.